Vietnam! (Food) -Nina

This post documents a large portion of the food that we ate in Vietnam. There was more. A lot more. But these are the most memorable things. The first section is all fruit, since we (namely, Cam's mom) prioritized that. Vietnamese fruit is delicious and there is so much more of it than in America! Cam's mom spent the majority of our time there putting plates of fruit in front of us. Just to put things in perspective, Cam's mom speaks very little English, and we speak no Vietnamese. But, by the end of the trip, the only phrases we learned were "eat more," "I'm full," and "thank you." 

Crazy fruit that looks like sea urchins! They're literally translated as "steal steal." The inside is sweet and juicy, and they sort of taste like grapes. Inside, it's clear/white, with a pit. 

Mangosteen! Also delicious. The inside is very sweet and sort of melts in your mouth. It also has sporadic pits/large seeds.

Vietnamese pomegranate is yellow! It tastes very similar to the pomegranate I'm used to, but instead of painstakingly separating the seeds in a bowl of water, you just pick them out and eat them directly. Much more rational. 

Baby bananas! They're much sweeter than the bananas I'm used to, and the peel is much thinner. Also, in Vietnam, you break bananas down the middle with the peel still on before eating them because eating them like we do makes you look like a monkey. But, in the process, the banana gets very mushy and disgusting. Kind of irrational. 

Abby and Cam getting ready to drink their coconut milk!

Me, drinking. Yum!

The inside of a custard apple! They taste sort of like candied apple pudding inside. Each of the green scales comes off individually. 

Jack fruit! The outside looks like a huge, spiky melon, and these yellow blobs grow on the inside. They're subtly sweet and have a slight taste of durian. Durian does not taste good (in my opinion), but jack fruit is just the right mix of flavors. (For those of you who don't know what durian is, it's basically melon that smells/tastes like garbage. I haven't ever eaten it, but the smell was enough for me. I personally think that anyone who claims to like durian is just trying to be different to look cool.)

We never figured out the name of these. They sort of taste like very very juicy, slightly spicy apples. You're supposed to eat them with salt and pepper. 

Avocado with condensed milk. In Vietnam, avocados are slightly bitter, so you mix them with condensed milk. Yum. Vietnamese coffee also has ridiculous amounts of condensed milk in it, enough so that I think it tastes like melted coffee ice cream. 

Guava from the rooftop garden! To be honest, I wasn't a big fan of guava. It sort of tastes like pear. You're also supposed to eat it with salt and chili pepper. To make this a fair and balanced news source, I will add that Abby really liked the guava. 

Fruit ninja eating the baby bananas.

Okay, we did eat things besides fruit once in a while!

Fried spring rolls with fish sauce. It turns out that "egg rolls" are actually just fried spring rolls. I have never encountered egg rolls in China, and now I understand why--they're Vietnamese!  

This picture really does not do this food justice. I apologize to Cam's mom who slaved over this all morning. It was so good! Basically, you fill bowls with a rice flour/water mixture, which turns into a little sticky rice cake. Then, you put a ground pork/shrimp mixture, with crispy onions, croutons, scallions, and fish sauce on top, and you mix everything together. It's very very yummy. 

 Fish sauce, by the way, for those who were wondering, is the sauce that oozes out when you let salted fish rot for weeks on end. Yes, it does sound incredibly disgusting. But, surprisingly, it's quite good when added to things in the right quantity. 

There was a great French bakery in the city that served pizza toast. We thought it was cute. 

We went to a fancy seafood place for dinner one night. These are wrap-your-own fish spring rolls.  Vietnamese people eat large amounts of fresh greens and herbs. At almost every meal we ate, there was a plate full of various herbs and lettuce leaves.

Oysters covered in cheese! CHEESE!! (Usually it is very hard to find in Asia, so this was exciting.)

This is a dried rice puff cake, covered in a tomato/seafood stew.

Eskimo pie ice cream! Ho Chi Minh City had some great ice cream places. I  miss them already. 

This is from the resort place outside of the city that tried to emulate Vietnam from hundreds of years ago. The food was very traditional too. I chose to eat spring rolls, a fried quail egg, a sweet waffle, a fried banana, a mini pancake, and pork wrapped in a rice pancake. Everything was delicious! We also tried chewing on sugar cane to suck out the juice, which was also quite good.

One of the feasts that Cam's mom made for us. It involved fish soup, fried fish wraps with noodles, and lots of fruits and vegetables to wrap up with everything. 

Cam's artistic arrangement of starfruit, pineapple, and cucumber. 

More delicious ice cream! This place had ice cream in the shape of bicycle carts, and Mickey Mouse. Besides looking beautiful, it was also SO GOOD. 

A traditional snack from Cam's family's hometown, Hue. It was a sticky, honey-y, peanuty, sesame seedy blob of deliciousness.

This restaurant was sort of like those rotating sushi restaurants, but instead of sushi, the plates were full of meats and vegetables to put into your individual bowl of hot pot. Hot pot is a very very hot soup that you use to cook things at your seat. They had fertilized eggs here, which is a Vietnamese specialty. I'll let you imagine what that might be.

Noodles with pork and crispy fried things. This was actually one of my favorite dishes that whole week. 

Okay, that's all the food blogging I'll do for now! I feel like I lack a wide range of vocabulary to describe food. I think I said "delicious" to describe everything. Oh well, I guess being a food critic is not in my future. 

There has been so much going on here in Xi'an this past week, but I wanted to share these pictures before I start to talk about what's been happening here. I really should have been lesson planning for the past hour, so I'll finally get to that now. Abby or I should do a post soon about getting adjusted to life in Xi'an!